Today, at 45, Moschos poses his questions about the world and the place of contemporary humans in a flow, a river in which pieces that make up the human face keep falling. This is how his works can be seen: as cryptic psychographs with their cohesion broken up. A succession of associations starting from reality go through mental shifts and transcendences to be distilled into his art in an allegorical way. True to the nature of the medium of painting, he records life as a reflection of fragments, as a dream. His deliberately vague narrative betrays a mood for inner wandering and a visceral flow towards some favourite images of his, like those from the Pergamon altar in the eponymous museum in Berlin, to familiar faces and personal experiences with which he builds a new space open to memories and fantasies. His images, statuesque and coloured in a palette that's never at a climax, delineate one another just like the mental associations in our brain. We cannot link the scenes through logic; we need to let go and just wander around.
Among this latest series of works, we can take up the thread in the composition & "The sleeplessness of reason…" & (a 'descendant' of the emblematic prints of Goya from the series 'The sleep of reason produces monsters'). In a tone that's equidistant from light and darkness and reminiscent of 1970s photos, the artist follows the process of forming the images with a mix of recognisable and abstract elements. These, while initially unconnected, end up penetrating one another to weave a story which is set in no particular place or time. Rising under the marble body of Apollo Musegetes is the figure of Dr. Strangelove (of Peter Sellers in the famous Stanley Kubrick film), while in the centre one recognises the face of the painter himself onto the aging body of an eerie figure.
"The works cannot exist unless they are bearers of ideas and emotions. When they have no raison d'être, they become mere decorative elements", I read in an interview of the painter. So what is the reason for Moschos—what is it that concerns him? The digital age, spearheaded by artificial intelligence and the successes it has scored in various fields, brings with it feelings of fear and an anxious quest for some stable points of reference. The explosive triumph of digital technology seems to have pulled the rug from under our feet, undermining all fixed worldviews, introducing a realm of chaotic semantics and imposing a pace that makes it hard to adapt to and impossible to be complacent about. What was for centuries a 'thing' is now a 'creature'. Science has led us to abstractions that our logic—a Euclidian logic, for all its refutations—fails to assimilate. We follow in theory these abstractions of a matter which is now quasi-matter, in a quasi-space and a quasi-time, but they cannot possibly become experiences or a way of life. Our knowledge increasingly disproves and negates our experiential reality. And since our 'world' is made up of both knowledge and experience, a feeling of void fills the gaping distance between the two.
The painter is no technophobe, nor does he try to turn his brushes into a scourge against science. As there are no societies capable of accepting a technology that's beyond them, and there never will be, all eras of rapid scientific advance bring about a technological Valhalla among the existing social structures. The painter is a man of his time, and his discourse is that of an artist whose thoughts cover all of humanity. In an age dominated by the speed of information, Moschos attempts to advance the prospects of another experience, of a more radical, essentially poetic thinking.
The painter is no technophobe, nor does he try to turn his brushes into a scourge against science. As there are no societies capable of accepting a technology that's beyond them, and there never will be, all eras of rapid scientific advance bring about a technological Valhalla among the existing social structures. The painter is a man of his time, and his discourse is that of an artist whose thoughts cover all of humanity. In an age dominated by the speed of information, Moschos attempts to advance the prospects of another experience, of a more radical, essentially poetic thinking.
To Moschos time is not linear: past and present coexist and generate a new reality. Time gets fragmented, turns into something like a multi-prismatic mirror in which the reflections intertwine to subject the viewer to multiple networks that are distortions, luminous deformations of space and time with an autonomy, a physicality; with a life of their own. Using a painterly collage more akin to the logic of montage, the artist manages to constantly fuse the present with the past, yesterday with tomorrow. The unorthodox montage of this multilevel reality though the images of memories, dreams and an emotional perception of the physical world provides us with the experience of an inner space.
The entire oeuvre of Moschos strikes a balance between the metaphysical and the realistic; it is complex but sincere, subjective but not egocentric. His compositions are not easily digested, not meant for hasty viewers. Reading his work takes time, tranquillity, concentration; his language is full, rich, unusual, and often needs the viewer's apperceptions. Yet his great gift is the ease with which he converses with an international audience: works of his can be found in Fondazione Orestiadi / Sicily, Sammlung-Schirm / Berlin, PTE Fine Arts / New York, Bernard Cheong Collection / Singapore.
To Moschos time is not linear: past and present coexist and generate a new reality. Time gets fragmented, turns into something like a multi-prismatic mirror in which the reflections intertwine to subject the viewer to multiple networks that are distortions, luminous deformations of space and time with an autonomy, a physicality; with a life of their own. Using a painterly collage more akin to the logic of montage, the artist manages to constantly fuse the present with the past, yesterday with tomorrow. The unorthodox montage of this multilevel reality though the images of memories, dreams and an emotional perception of the physical world provides us with the experience of an inner space.
Born in Heraklion, Crete in 1979, he took his first lessons by his father, the painter Takis Moschos. "His workshop was one of my favourite haunts; I used to spend endless hours in there studying, painting and talking", Nikos once said. He studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1997-2003), and his works were bought by collectors even in his student years. References from ancient Greek sculpture, the Baroque, expressionism (distortions of Francis Bacon) and New Objectivity (Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Georg Grosz) to comics, cinema and the sculptural machines of Dada come to enrich his personal language without imposing themselves. The painter metabolises all this into a chromatic and stylistic idiom where there is motion, fluidity and constantly changing situations, human experiences and emotions. His résumé is full of participations in international exhibitions, most recently in this summer's VOLTA Art Fair in Basel, Switzerland. In Cyprus his first solo exhibition is presented at the Stand in Line - Art Space.
